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User blog:Drayco90/Game Review- inFAMOUS: Second Son
inFAMOUS Second Son delivers a thrilling, gorgeous experience that any PS4 owner should pay attention to- though maybe not buy a console for. Second Son, like its predecessors, is made up of a mixing pot of numerous genres, all of which are honed to functionality but none ironed out to perfection. The core of the combat is built on third person shooters, with many of the super powers wielded by protagonist Delsin Rowe acting as analogues for various shooter firearms. The pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, frag grenade and rocket launcher are all on display yet again, cloaked to look like blasts of flaming smoke and particle effect laced neon blasts. While its not necessarily the most unique, the important part of the combat is the execution, which Second Son nails fairly well. Running through the crowded streets of Seattle, firing charged up blasts of smoke or shooting out the legs of your enemies with beams of neon lasers feels powerful, and most importantly, fun. The relatively shallow melee combat from the last two games also returns. Delsin's melee actually changes based on which of the game's four powers you are currently using, and there are a few new tricks, like smoke dashing into enemies to slam them into the ground, to help mix it up, so while it still lacks depth or variety, it manages to include enough options to make it a fun alternative to ranged attacks for a brief period. While Cole was a relatively squishy main character, prone to needing to take cover and hide or recharge from circuit breakers in order to heal and stave off death, Delsin feels like a real sponge for damage, even on the game's expert difficulty. It doesn't help that the enemies do little to push you to utilize options in combat. The vast majority of the enemies you face, the faceless armored DUP troopers, utilize firearms at range and tend to jump around using concrete powers similar to the Ice Jump powers from inFAMOUS 2, which can make targeting them difficult at time, and every once in a while they'll try shooting a blast of concrete your way. There are a few ambient enemies, drug dealers, Akuran gang members and cops depending on your morality choices, but they offer even fewer options, essentially only firing guns and dying in significantly fewer shots. Outside of one brief but cool sequence which I will not spoil, the only other enemy you really have to contend with in Second Son is the Heavy DUP Troops, which come in two varieties- melee and ranged. Neither is particularly fun to fight, and primarily just suck up damage in a way the rest of the enemies don't. As a result of the incredibly small variety of enemies, the game is much easier than the last two, and fails to push the player to really experiment with their powers and utilize the potential depth of strategies each power could offer. There are four powers in the game, though I will only reference Smoke and Neon, the two shown in pre-release footage by name in this review, and each of them actually manages to feel like a completely different set of unique powers. Smoke is more about destruction and debilitating groups of enemies, while Neon is much more precise and long range. The third power brings some really unique stealth and even some summoning elements into the battle, and the fourth is all about raw strength and power. Each power set has a tree of unlockable and upgradable abilities- each power has an equivalent to the core powers like the bolt, grenade and rocket, but each takes a unique enough spin on it that they never feel alike. For example- the basic "bolt" power for Smoke fires what effectively amounts to a pistol shot, while the Neon equivalent is actually a sniper rifle round that works best when you zoom in, causing it to highlight where to target the enemy for a kill or a non-lethal "suppression". Many of these powers also have unique upgrades available based on your Karma- which is still earned from either killing or suppressing your enemies, making story choices, and doing world events as a hero or villain. The basic Smoke bolt for Good Karma characters allows you to stun enemies each time you get a headshot, allowing for an instant close-range suppress, while the Evil Karma upgrade gives you a chance to completely disintegrate the enemy with headshots- functionally very similar powers that radically alter the playstyle of that particular power and move. Obtaining these upgrades requires you to spend collectible Blast Shards. Blast Shards, unlike their appearance in inFAMOUS and inFAMOUS 2, where they were scattered by the hundreds everywhere in the city, are used as generators for the DUP's flying camera drones throughout Seattle, and Delsin makes it a sidequest to hunt down and destroy all of them to get their shards. These new Blast Shard collectibles are representative of the fate of the series side content in this game as a whole- its been reduced, de-emphasized, and is largely repetitive and even a little boring. There are ultimately only a handful of side activities- you can collect shards, destroy cameras throughout the district, find audio logs, perform agent takedowns where you have to search an area for a hidden DUP agent and kill them, and graffiti tagging walls. Tagging is probably the most interesting of the activities- in order to spray your graffiti, you find a point where you are given a good karma or evil karma option, effecting which painting you chose to make. Players are then prompted to hold the controller on its side, shake it, and spray with one of the triggers- moving the controller to spray the paint. It's a transparent "launch system" gimmick, but its neater than most, and not nearly as intrusive as many similar features in the past. Outside of these activities, each district of Seattle features a DUP base, which Delsin has to clear out and destroy the center of, gaining several Shards in the process. Completing each of these activities lowers the DUP's control of the district, and once brought low enough, you are able to trigger a District Showdown- where a small force of DUP troops arrive to take back control of their city. If you win, you're able to shut their forces out of the district and stop their patrols. Clearing the districts has the added benefit of giving you a fast travel point there, but the upgraded mobility system of the game means that you likely won't use it much, if ever. While the platforming itself in the game has never been weaker for a Sucker Punch title- with significantly less control and grab-points on buildings or during jumps, it more than makes up for it by providing a plethora of new traversal powers that make Cole's agile climbing and parkour obsolete. Each power has its own unique traversal, and each is not only worthwhile, but incredibly fun. Smoke powers can dash around the environment in brief bursts as a cloud of smoke, which can be weaponized against opponents or allow for speedy climbing by traveling through ventilation systems located on most buildings, allowing Delsin to soar across the cityscape. Neon powers, on the other hand, give a super speed that essentially turn Delsin into The Flash, complete with running on walls and up buildings with abandon. The traversal only gets better the deeper you get in the game, and once again, exploring and traveling from one end of the city to the other is one of the strongest parts about inFAMOUS. One of the last major changes to the gameplay of inFAMOUS is the new Karmic Streaks. A you perform certain actions, either non-lethally subduing enemies and healing civilians for Good Karma or nondescript murder of everyone around you for Evil Karma, you rack up a multiplier that, when maxed out, allows you to perform a unique, and incredibly powerful attack that devastates the area and looks incredibly flashy at the same time. These powers are leaps and bounds better than their equivalent, Ionic Powers, from the second game, never really feel like the get old- though only three of the four powers gain access to them. As par the course for this series, one of inFAMOUS: Second Son's strongest features is its cast of characters and the way they interact with each other. At the core of this cast is the player character Delsin, and his brother, a cop named Reggie. The duo make up the backbone of the emotional journey Delsin goes through as he awakens to his powers and role in the world, and creates a strong set of very realistic, and very endearing characters. They argue, fight and get mad at each other for the pettiest of things, but genuinely care about each other, and ultimately do the best they can to look out for and protect the other. Around these two, a small but memorable cast of other characters begins to form around them- Fetch, Eugene and Hank are all compelling in their own ways, while the central antagonist, Brooke Augustine, like Kessler and Bertrand before her, is one of the game's most interesting figures, with some really interesting depth to her motivations. Perhaps the best character interactions are with Betty, the sweet old woman from Delsin's Akomish tribe who acts as a matronly figure for him in his journey- calling him at multiple points to check in on him and his brother, with radically different conversations based on your karma. Each of the characters is really sold by the excellent voice acting and the motion capture, which also captures their facial motions to help really sell the emotions of the characters. Perhaps the most distracting part of this is that, in spite of Delsin and the rest being extremely well voiced and modeled, it's incredibly hard to shake the fact that Troy Baker is performing the main character's voice, and he sounds like just another Troy Baker character. Its good work, but distracting in the same way Nolan North's speaking voice became after the Uncharted and Assassin's Creed series hit their peak. It's a real shame, because Arkham Origins and The Last of Us last year both reaffirm that Baker has quite enough range to bring a unique energy and personality to each character he plays. The core story itself is a well written and interesting one, primarily drawing on the trend of rising paranoia directed at the United States government by its citizens, with some heavy inspiration taken from the X-Men franchise. Seven years after the events of the second inFAMOUS, all super-powered Conduits have been redubbed as Bio-Terrorists, and the government has created a special task-force, the DUP, who is tasked with reigning the Bio-Terrorists in and keeping the populace safe. The events of the game kick off when three of these Conduits escape from a DUP truck traveling through Delsin's Akomish home, taking refuge in Seattle, leading to the DUP to set up an Orwellian blockade across the whole city to try and capture them, which Delsin must descend into. It's all well written, but also suffers from an extremely short length- about 8 hours to 100% everything, including sidequests and collectibles, and if you focus primarily on the story content, you're looking at a game that's about half as long as the first two installments, which is a bit of a disappointment. Another major knock against Second Son's story is that there is almost no change in how things play out based on your Karmic decisions. Most of them make the dialogue change slightly, and let you play slightly different versions of about three missions, and there a couple conversations that change, but outside these couple missions and the ending, the story changes are almost nonexistent, to an almost awkward degree. The whole game very much feels like it was written for the Good Karma character, with some small changes made to try and poorly accommodate an evil one. Numerous interactions between Reggie and Delsin feel incredibly strange and poorly handled, and the game feels like it pulls the kind of punches that the first two installments never did in regards to how people react or feel about evil karma actions. It's quite a disappointment, and makes replaying the game mostly pointless, unless you're really into getting the trophies for it. Possibly the most notable aspect of the game is how drop dead gorgeous it is. Seattle is lovingly recreated and the city is clearly a next generation game that could never run on the Playstation 3- with impressive draw distances and visual effects. As mentioned in the above, the characters are each lovingly rendered and thanks to the motion and facial captures, are incredibly expressive and impressively articulate. The lighting and particle effects from the powers are impressive, and occasionally even jaw dropping- especially at night, during the rain, where the water pools up on the ground, creating reflections and effected the powers in gorgeous ways that makes me desperately wish the game also featured dynamic weather system. The game runs at a pretty solid 30 frames per second, with very few hitches, drops or slow down throughout- an impressive feat, considering the amount of framerate issues that plagued the original games. While 60fps would obviously be preferable, the fact that the game is able to keep it consistent at any framerate at all is a large step up, and 30 is far from unplayable by any means, and the framerate is not sacrificed in vain- with the resolution sitting at 1080p, sacrificing the performance to ensure the best visual fidelity possible. As a result, inFAMOUS: Second Son is easily the best looking game available on the Playstation 4. inFAMOUS: Second Son isn't the best game in the series. Honestly speaking, it might actually be the weakest installment to date, but ultimately? It's still one great ride- full of memorable characters, gorgeous explosions and compelling powers to tear apart enemies. While significantly shorter and filled with much less content than the other games, a lot of what is here is extremely well done, and anyone with a Playstation 4 should be looking at this game...but if you don't have one yet, this game alone is probably not worth the price of entry on a console. 4 Out of 5 Category:Blog posts